February 7, 2018

Acxiom May Spin Off Marketing Services Business

Assembling unified data for customer success management is a core use case for Customer Data Platforms. That’s why you should care that Bolstra has just raised $1.5 million for its B2B customer success platform. It’s the company’s second "seed” round, following a $1.5 million raise last February. Bolstra tracks customers through their lifecycles, recommends actions, and provides structured workflows for those actions. It builds a complete view of each customer but doesn’t share it as easily as a true CDP.

It may be even less clear why you should care that marketing data and services giant Acxiom has reorganized itself into separate data and services units. But many CDP users do rely on Acxiom’s LiveRamp group, which will now be the home for all Acxiom’s data assets. The data business accounted for 24% of Acxiom’s third quarter revenues but all the revenue growth. Acxiom announced it’s considering sale, spin-off, or other options for its services business. Some perspective: Acxiom got its start in 1969 as a marketing services company and purchased LiveRamp in 2014.

Coincidentally, we have a survey from data vendor Experian, which last year spun off its own marketing services business as Cheetah Digital. The survey offers intriguing insights into the thinking of a broad range of senior executives who were mostly outside of marketing. For example: Single Customer View ranked dead last among planned data management projects, far behind data integration, analytics, and master data management. And, 54% of respondents think their customers are fully aware of how the company uses their data and trust the company to use it responsibly. Seems unlikely.

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